The Conflict in the Middle East Is About One Thing: Iran

On Saturday afternoon, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams in Israel’s north, killing 12 children.

For the last 10 months, many have warned that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror group that controls southern Lebanon. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting—and winning—in Israel’s north since October 8. Since that time, Hezbollah has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel by pummeling the border towns daily with rockets, leaving 225 square miles unlivable for Israelis and displacing around 80,000 Israeli citizens.

Israel—pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions—now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. The prospect of an all-out war with Hezbollah, which could very well spread to a larger, more dangerous regional war—perhaps directly with Iran—seems closer than ever.

What will Israel do? Will Israel choose to confront Hezbollah, or will it respond in a more limited way to avoid the regional escalation that the Americans so fear? How does U.S. policy, and the upcoming presidential election, influence Israel’s strategic calculation? Is Kamala Harris equipped to bring calm to the region? Or are Israelis just waiting for Trump to return to office? Is America’s current policy—containment of Iran—backfiring and inadvertently creating a regional crisis? Who will bring more calm: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Most importantly, should we be thinking about the war with Gaza and the war with Hezbollah as discrete fights, or are they all part of a broader war that’s already underway between Israel and Iran?

Addressing those questions today is Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv is a journalist and writer for The Times of Israel, and he is one of the most important and insightful thinkers of our time on Israel and the Middle East.

I sat down to record this conversation with Haviv on Monday. The 24 hours since then have brought major news. On Tuesday evening Israel time, the IDF conducted a targeted airstrike in Beirut against the Hezbollah commander it says is responsible for the murder of the 12 children in Majdal Shams. The commander, Fuad Shukr, is reported to have been third in command of Hezbollah. What this means for rising tensions and the potential for all-out war is still uncertain. But in the minutes after the IDF confirmed the strike, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, tweeted “Hezbollah crossed the red line.”

To listen to my conversation with Haviv click below, or scroll down for an edited transcript:

On the devastating July 27 attack:

Bari Weiss: There’s a war that has been largely ignored by the world outside of the Middle East, the war between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel. That war took a dramatic and horrible turn this past Saturday. And I want you to tell us what happened.

Haviv Rettig Gur: There was a group of kids playing soccer in an elementary school league that had become very popular among Druze youngsters on the Golan Heights—and they were having a game. And then the rocket exploded right in the middle of them. There were 12 kids killed. Two dozen or so injured. Some severely maimed. And this happened to a community that really is in between all the many different players.

BW: I think a lot of people who hear the word Druze will wonder, what is that? So let’s explain for a brief moment who the Druze are. Are they Arab, Muslim, or Israeli? Who were the people on that soccer field?

HRG: The Druze are historically a religious offshoot from Islam. They have a religious tradition similar in its conception of theology to Kabbalah in Judaism. But the religion was made secret early on, because of oppression in Muslim lands. The Druze have a religious obligation to be loyal to the state that rules where they live. So in Israel the Druze are some of the most loyal soldiers of the IDF. They have reached the second highest rank in the IDF. There’s currently a Druze general serving as a Major General. And in the Golan Heights, because the Golan was captured in 1967 from Syria, the Druze there started out still loyal to the Assad regime. But younger people are feeling more Israeli after the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 shattered the country. Also, Israel helped protect the Druze of southern Syria in the Syrian civil war. So there’s a growing desire among Druze in Israel to be Israeli.

There are probably 10 or 11 villages along the northern border that have to be rebuilt. They’re simply devastated. And now Hezbollah has massacred children. And we have to show the Druze that we respect them. We Jews have that responsibility to respect them as much as ourselves. Now, I think the general feeling in Israel is that there has to be a serious Israeli response.

How the war in the north has been simmering for ten months:

BW: I don’t think many people understand that Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy group that has successfully redrawn the border of Israel at its north. Which is really astonishing. So how have they done that? Basic table stakes here. What does the war in Israel’s north look like? And what has been the fallout from that? 

HRG: On October 8, Hezbollah started firing rockets at northern Israel. And those rocket barrages never stop. They have been going for almost 10 months. They’re always calculated and modulated to be less than what any Israeli response would be. Hezbollah received an order from Iran: exact as much cost as you can from Israel without being destroyed. Iran does not want Hezbollah destroyed. The reason Iran has spent billions upon billions for decades building Hezbollah into the formidable force it is today is so that in a future Iran-Israel war, Hezbollah can open another front against Israel and help save Iran. 

BW: What’s happened to the people that live in these towns along Israel’s northern border?

HRG: Everybody within five kilometers was ordered by the Israeli army to leave the area. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people. Several months ago, the state admitted it has lost track of most of them. It doesn’t actually know where most of them are. They went wherever they could. At the beginning, the state took these people out of their homes and paid for them to stay in hotels. It doesn’t sound terrible. It’s terrible. Schools didn’t open, communities were displaced and taken apart. And these people have not been able to go home. While they have been gone, Hezbollah rocket barrages have destroyed sections, turning them into ghost towns on the northern border. The north is more physically devastated than the communities near the Gaza border.

On possible responses by Israel to the Hezbollah attack: 

BW: After the attack on the soccer field, Netanyahu said Israel will not overlook it. Hezbollah will pay a heavy price that has not been paid before. There have been a lot of statements like this. What do you think Israel’s actually going to do? What are Israel’s options? 

HRG: Everybody is watching for the Israeli response. Israel took 220 Yemeni missile attacks until one actually broke through and killed somebody in Tel Aviv. And then the Israeli response was not for that one rocket that killed someone in Tel Aviv. It was for 220 attacks. And it was a response that had a devastating effect on the main oil export terminal of the Houthi government. What Israel’s response needs to be here—it can’t be just for those kids. It has to be for the entire ten months of bombardment, of the emptying of our north, of the destroying of our towns. One thing that tells me that the Israeli response is going to be significant is that the new president of Iran had a conversation with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and said to him that if the Israeli response is significant, if there’s a war in Lebanon, then there will be some catastrophic response against Israel—in other words, Iran is starting to swing into action to try to defend Lebanon from what is expected to be a very significant Israeli response. 

How America’s de-escalation policy hinders Israel’s ability to fight:

HRG: Hezbollah has something like 150,000 rockets. There are roughly 200 villages scattered throughout the mountains of south Lebanon. Every rocket is under a home. And those 150,000 rockets are capable of setting Tel Aviv on fire. Hezbollah was built to be what Hamas is, but 10 to 15 times more dangerous. The Israeli army, and the Israeli government, the Israeli political class is looking at the war in Gaza, at how long it’s going to take to degrade Hamas and do long-term reconstruction. And they see that a lot of the Israeli reserve manpower is exhausted. I have two brothers-in-law who are in the war. One of them was gone like 200 days fighting in Gaza. They’re exhausted. So a war in Lebanon, which will be much more difficult than Gaza—Tel Aviv and cities of Israel will face rocket barrages larger than anything Gaza can produce—is something you don’t go into easily, you don’t go into quickly, you don’t go into without a few aces up your sleeve. You don’t go into without clear backing against the larger patron of Hezbollah, who will activate every asset they have in the region, meaning Iran. In other words, you don’t go into it without America. That’s the view of the Israeli leadership. And America has had one overriding priority. And that is not to allow an escalation in the region.

BW: Well, let’s dig into that for just a moment. Because winning requires escalation. So if the official strategy or insistence of the White House is no escalation, just contain the level of fighting, how can Israel win the war? 

HRG: That’s exactly right. If America pressures Israel on hostage negotiations, that doesn’t bring Hamas to the table. It takes Hamas away from the table because they understand that if they wait and let Israel marinate in the American pressure, there’s some significant chance that Israel will cave to some further demand. Every time America acts in this region to lower the level of the war, the enemy looks at that and says the Americans are deeply allergic to escalation. 

Hezbollah has lost something like 400 fighters, including some senior commanders, but Hezbollah doesn’t care. And certainly Hezbollah’s masters in Iran don’t care about those losses. So Hezbollah has been able to sustain this. And Israel has not had the backing of America for the larger war that would cause the kind of damage to Hezbollah and to Iran that would make them guess again.

The same exact thing is true of Yemen. Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen and Hamas believe that they have found a way to destroy us. And it is an analysis that is essentially based on an analysis of our government as risk averse. I think they’re right. 

BW: I think the perception of Bibi in America is that he’s this warmonger. But the criticism of him in Israel is exactly the opposite. In other words, he is incapable of seeing conflicts or wars to their victorious conclusion. 

HRG: He’s incapable of taking the kind of risks, the kind of decisions, and he never has been capable of doing so. He has always chosen the path of least resistance, and he’s doing it now. The Israeli army paused for a long time in Gaza because it couldn’t go into Rafah because the Biden administration was putting pressure on Netanyahu. The primary point that I’m making is that he’s just navigating political pressures he feels and not actually strategizing and thinking seriously about the future. He gives speeches as if he’s doing so, but on the ground, he does not. We have a risk-averse government, and it is restrained to the point where it can be bullied.

The tragedy of an American administration that can only see stability is that it simply cannot imagine any other interest. Iran, under the cover of America’s obsession with stability, is demolishing nations and trying to destroy us. And so we could use that American help. Not American boots on the ground, not American sacrifice, but logistical help, missile shipments, coordination. On April 14, there was this massive missile attack by Iran on Israel in response to the killing of an Iranian general. Iran launched the biggest missile attack in the history of missile attacks. And they were shot down almost in their entirety by a huge alliance of Sunni countries and Israel against Iran. The airspace of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries were open to Israel. Jordan actually shot down Iranian drones. All of that was made possible by America. So we need that American help.

How Israel is thinking about Kamala vs. Trump:

BW: How is Israel looking at the present state of American politics? Who does it want to win the election?

HRG: It’s an election. It’s not about Israel, and it’s not about Gaza. You want to end the Gaza war? You want to prevent a war in Lebanon? You want to end the terrible civil war in Yemen and bring the forces to the table in Yemen that have starved 85,000 children to death and devastated that country? You want to fix the Middle East? It’s about Iran and it’s only about Iran. And it will only ever be about Iran. And until you solve Iran, nations will continue to be demolished. And America has to do that.

Everything I have seen from Democrats says they cannot, will not, don’t know how. They don’t have a vocabulary of foreign policy that allows them to seriously take up that challenge.

I wish I could say that the Republicans do. Some Republicans do. Will the Republicans in power in a new Trump administration know how to do any of that? I have no idea.

But on Iran, the Democrats have failed.

There are these quotes from Obama from back in 2015 that lifting sanctions will not cause Iran to become a dominant power in the region. If there’s any power in the region that is dominant in any way today, it’s Iran. So Obama’s own predictions about his own policies have proven completely incorrect.

Everybody’s lives in the Middle East depend on ending the Iranian regime’s crusade that has so far conquered and destroyed or is in some state of demolishing four different Arab countries and wants to destroy my country and says so publicly and will not stop until somebody stops it. And if America doesn’t have a policy on that—and Democrats do not—then America is part of the problem. 

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